Some thoughts on silence
I can remember several recurring instances where I acknowledged being in complete silence. One of them was in my grandma's bathroom after getting off the bus from school in the afternoon. I always had to use the restroom so bad at that exact same time, which I also found interesting. The silence was interesting because it was loud. If it was loud, how did I know that I was "in silence"? Well, I heard the same "noise" everyday when I was in the "silence" and I was pretty sure there was nothing else around that would make any of the noise I heard. There weren't any machines on in the house or outside. I knew this because I had explored the house and the neighborhood thoroughly. When you move around with respect to noise sources, that's how you can tell where they are and that they are in fact the source of some particular noise...other than stereoscopic effects. Now I wonder if I could somehow measure the frequency spectrum of what I hear when I'm in complete silence. How can you do that and test that what you did makes sense? I could create complete silence by using a microphone more sensitive than my ears connected to some electronics or a computer to tell me if there was a signal coming out. Then I'd have to trust the engineers who wrote the spec of the microphone...for some reason. Or maybe not. It's hard to remember what you were talking about or trying to do sometimes. Especially when you didn't have any goal in mind anyway. Right now I'm in the Blacklight Lounge on the fourth floor of East Campus, on the west parallel. It was kind of quiet for a little while. I could hear a very faint hum of the Millipede arcade machine and the soft buzz of the ballasts in the black lights. Because the sound of them is so unchanging and persistent, my brain seems to drop them out unless I pay attention to their sounds, in which case they seem to be amplified.

I started messing around with electronic music several years ago when I learned that MATLAB had this function called sound that pushes a vector out of your computer speaker at whatever sample rate you pick. I had been taking a class on computational neuroscience that I had to program simulations of neurons in MATLAB for the problem sets, so I had some practice with some good maths for creating some neat waveforms. When you can connect programming directly to sound or graphics, it just makes everything fun, so I haven't really stopped doing it. Now I'm taking Electronic Music Composition with Peter Whincop, which was recommended to me by lots of my friends. Our first assignment was to record around 40 short sounds and to arrange them using only techniques that would have been possible in the days of cutting and splicing tape, but we used computers. I did my piece with a sound programming language called Csound. Here's an MP3 of it and a zip of the source code:
okie-movingonafteraslipperyafternoon.mp3
okie-movingonafteraslipperyafternoon.zip

The naturalistic fallacy occurs when something natural is claimed to be inherently good and that the unnatural is inherently bad.

A slice of a conversation during a chance meeting in a secret underground Athena cluster:

Okie: What if other intelligent life in the universe had a reason to make the rest of the universe look like it was expanding to us? For example, maybe it or they knew that we'd develop the technology to make the Sun blow up into a supernova and that we would likely decide to do it for one reason or another and then they could then swipe up all the goodies that come out like massive elements, organic compounds, etc.? We can easily imagine how this could be done. Just imagine if you take a bunch of little solar panels and put them around a light bulb so that they're a sphere and put some red LEDs on the back of them.

Scarby: Why wouldn't they just blow it up themselves?

Okie: I don't know, for some other reason we don't know?

Scarby: Maybe because they probably have to get approval from Congress before they can go and blow up another star.

On feminism and celebration

I am a feminist, but to be more specific, I will act as if I am about to give my opinions about some ideas that may characterize different schools of thought.

I look at feminism from the point of view of myself in the current time and project myself to different times. So, for example, I look at the principles and ideas of first-wave feminism by projecting myself to other periods in time, and then I consider the relevance of those ideas in the world today. Through these projections, I ask myself several questions: What is the current state of things? What is the ideal state of things? What change is possible? What's the best way to influence change?

Of course I believe that laws should apply equally to both sexes (even abortion laws, though men cannot currently birth children). That's a given. And I won't address those aspects of feminist movements. Outside of legal equality, the second-wave feminist movement that began around the early 1960s addressed sexuality and non-legal inequalities. These issues are rooted in the traditions of societies, and some argue that even capitalism plays a destructive role here. Inequalities in the workforce and sexuality issues spurred scientific debate regarding gender differences, and reactions to these debates led to third-wave feminism and post-feminism.

Third-wave feminism challenges the definition of femininity, supports a more continuous notion of gender, and celebrates freedom in sexuality. Some say that third-wave feminism is the result of generations that have grown up with feminism. This is true, but it's often followed by a negative critique of third-wave feminism. My issue with the statement is that third-wave feminism is complex and is a result of many more factors than just "growing up with feminism".

About the same time the third-wave feminist movement and other movements such as the LGBT movement were moving to celebration of sexuality, other ideas also "decided" that it was time to celebrate. The theme is celebration. The free use of terms that used to be considered offensive is celebrated. Anything that was not previously celebrated is celebrated: the terms cunt, whore, bitch, etc., prostitution, stereotypes of all types. Intellectuals, celebrate. Anti-intellectuals, celebrate. Atheists, celebrate; the evangelical Christians were already celebrating. To get attention, you celebrate. Everyone likes a party, and the biggest party wins. Celebrate because you have all the sex, all the drugs, and you have the best life. Celebrate because you've had it tough. You have the biggest tits, the biggest dick, and have all the fun. You have the cutest tits, the cutest dick, and you look really good in your clothes. Celebrate because you're super fat, celebrate because you can make fun of people really well. You work hard. You are the most passionate; you understand people. Celebrate the solstice. What you make, everyone adores.

Has humility been trumped? Has it always been this way, or does it cycle? How long must we wait for no gender or infinite varieties of gender, one mind or infinite minds?

This is a video clip put through a filter I wrote in MATLAB. It finds edges that are moving and creates a transparent haze there that cycles through the colors of the rainbow and more.
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/42394/okierainbow.avi

The constructal theory is the mental viewing that the generation of design (configuration, pattern, geometry) in nature is a physics phenomenon that unites all animate and inanimate systems, and that this phenomenon is covered by the Constructal Law stated by Adrian Bejan in 1996: "For a finite-size (flow) system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve such that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it."

Life can be described as those systems that evolve to make energy flow through them most efficiently.

SPECTRAL UNIVERSES! MATH POEM THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
This is a beautiful thought experiment expounded by Harold Cooper about the possible evolution of continuously morphing, continuous universes. He proves that if the universe is continuous and changes continuously, then no matter what the physical laws are, it will not eventually reach every possible state, among other things.

John Conway lectures on the free will theorem that says if we have some free will, then according some assumptions, so do particles like electrons.
http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/flash/lectures/2009_03_04_conway_free_will.shtml

"Some readers may object to our use of the term “free will” to describe the indeterminism of particle responses. Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom. Indeed, it is natural to suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate explanation of our own."

Some things to try with brain farms...

1. Connect the brains to virtual worlds and try to get them to learn, grow, and become intelligent. They may need participation of grown people in the virtual worlds to teach them.

2. Speed up the physics in the virtual world to see how this affects intelligence.

3. Try to make a brain intelligent enough in a virtual world to educate other new brains that are connected to the virtual world.

4. Put a new brain that is to be educated in a virtual world in a virtual world that is embedded in the virtual world of a brain that was educated in that virtual world. Increase the simulation speed (and/or vary other parameters) in each level of the hierarchy of virtual worlds. Oversight by brains whose access spans multiple levels of virtual worlds might be needed.

5. Connect new brains in different ways at different times in their development. For example, connect the output of one brain's visual cortex past the basic image processing functions to the input of the visual cortex of a new brain so that higher levels of abstaction may be formed. This could also be done in the code of a virtual world. Or, try to connect multiple brains to one agent in a virtual world.

6. Vary the physics of the virtual worlds. For example, make random things less random, make everything squishier, make physics non-local, or omit conservation of mass and energy.

7. Vary the basis of "reward". Make the reward mechanism be based on arrangement of symbols that are valid syntax of a programming language with increasing rewards for code that calculates elementary mathematical functions, generates random numbers, or has an output of high Kolmogorov complexity.